The Other Davos: Globalization of Resistances and Struggles by Francois Houtart and Francois Polet

Published by
Christava Sahitya Samithi (CSS), Thiruvalla, Kerela, India, November 2000. This material was
prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

Chapter 3: The World Strategy of Capitalism, by Samir Amin

A second retrospective
analysis has been offered by Mr. Samir Amin in the name of the World Forum for
Alternatives. This text is entitled Globalisation of social struggles. As in
Prof. Perry Anderson’s text, we will simply take the passages concerning the
interpretation of current mutations and reserve the more projective part for
the second part of the book.

The World Forum for
Alternatives

The idea for the
Constitution of a forum bringing together social struggles and intellectuals
working on the analysis of situations and the search for alternatives was born
in 1996, at the 20th anniversary of the Tricontinental Centre in
Louvain-La-Neuve. The idea took form in Cairo in March 1997 where a provisional
Executive Board was constituted and a manifesto drawn up. The manifesto was
signed by more than one thousand people across the world. In May 1998 itwas
decided to organise, at the beginning 1999, a meeting and a press conference at
the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Several organisations
and individuals worked together to bring this project to fruition. The Forum
plans to establish links with a series of networks of social movements and also
to set up working groups on social Movements and on Alternatives to the
capitalist organisation of the economy.

At the outset of the Davos initiative,
there was significant involvement by the Mont Pèlerin sect”, following the
“guru” Von Hayek. The sect advocated total economic liberalism with no reserves
or borders, in other words a reactionary utopia of complete submission of
societies to the exclusive unilateral logic of capital, their ‘adjustment’ --
in all its dimensions, political and social -- to the sole rationale of the
project. The electoral victories of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in 1980
inaugurated the start of that programme. But after 1989-90, with the
foreseeable implosion of the Soviet system, the ruling classes of the
capitalist world were seized by a formidable revisionist orgy. History has
finally achieved its goal, we dared to write. The socialist dream has ended, as
has the dream of the independence of nations. We return, but this time on a
world scale, to capitalism tried and true. The world media claimed that there
were no alternatives to this, capitalism was our inevitable path. Exhausted,
the national populist blocs of the Third world that were proposing to deepen
their victory against previous colonialism with a
modernisation-industrialisation presented in the perspective of “catching up”.
Third world countries had to submit to plans called structural adjustment, and
thus to the exclusive ambitions of capital expansion dominated by
transnationals. Everything that the people had achieved through their struggles
over the centuries was to be abrogated. This included the Welfare State in
developed countries -- a regulation of a much too ‘social’ market. The French
Revolution itself had to be brought into question. Davos was set up in this
climate to be the high mass of the revisionists.

The real content of the programme of
these gentlemen (and some ladies) is undeniable because at its base it
guarantees maximum profit for capital, at the price of stagnation and growing
inequality between the small minorities benefiting from the system and all the
working classes, and between the nations of the triad and all the rest. It is a
system that fatally engenders poverty, unemployment, and exclusion, often on a
continental scale.

The programme therefore had to be dressed
up with the strong affirmation of great words: speeches on ‘open society, the
sign of equality automatically placed between Market and Democracy, the elegy
of the so-called deregulation which had come to be the synonym of liberty
(without clarifying whose), the anti-state speeches, the state which was
considered to be the obvious synonym of bureaucrats, autocrats and idiots, no
longer the possible instrument of the management of historic social
compromises, founded on democracy. All these found their place in this campaign
of orchestrated propaganda. We refuse to be trapped by misleading speeches.
They have no scientific basis and are proven ungrounded every day.

There are no deregulated markets except
those in the fantastic imaginations of ‘pure’ economists. The detractors of
such markets will not be self-regulated but exploited. In reality markets
function because they are regulated. Thus the question is to know by whom, and
to the benefit of whom. Deregulation is the fig leaf that covers clandestine
regulation (in contradiction therefore to the fundamental rule of democracy
that demands transparency) by the dominant capital of oligopolies. The MAI
takes this quasi-mafiosi form of regulation by the transnationals to the
extreme, as the project in question gives them the freedom to judge themselves
-- to be simultaneously the judges and the judged, again, in contradiction to
the fundamental rules of democratic law. The WTO is a black room, charged with
rubber-stamping accords secretly concluded in the corridors of the Organisation
(in the name of secrecy of private business) by the oligopolies. The precarious
state of the salaried is not due to deregulation, but to the regulation of the
work market by a single partner -- the bosses, we rarely see accepted rules so
similar to those practised by the Mafia.

The implementation of a neo-liberal
programme equally coincides - not coincidentally -- with the development of a
structural crisis of capitalism of gigantic proportions. This programme
therefore becomes the way of handling this crisis. The imbalance between
production capacities on the one hand and those of consumption on the other,
endlessly deepened by growing inequalities themselves the result of neo-liberal
policies, engenders a surplus that cannot be invested in the expansion of productive
systems. To avoid the devaluation of capital - what most billionaires fear most
-- they need to create alternative means to fund the system. Monetarism,
floating exchanges, foreign debt of third world countries and former eastern
countries, the American deficit all these together make up the means for the
management of this crisis. This explains the apparent paradox that is not one:
that the levels of profit (especially those of investments) are increasing,
stock market values rise every time ‘good news’ is announced - an economic
stagnation, a dismantling of industry, or the growth of unemployment.

Of course the sole success of this policy
has been to deepen the social catastrophe.

Simultaneously the most fanatic
supporters of ‘deregulation’ remain entrenched in the ‘regulationist’, but
there is no question of them allowing the migration of workers. Whereas if such
migration were to be regulated while the trade in goods and the transfer of
capital are given free reign, this results in the inevitable aggravation of
development inequalities among nations.

2. The degradation of
Democracy

Economic globalisation as laid out by
neo-liberalism necessarily accompanies the degradation of democracy, which, if
it does not permit social progress, loses its sense and credibility.

In rich and powerful countries with an
established parliamentary tradition neo-liberalism feeds a dangerous trend
towards what can be called ‘low-intensity democracy’, the alternative without
being one so that, whether you vote white, green, blue or red, your fate no
longer depends on the government you have chosen but on the whims of the
market, on (secret) strategies of the oligopolies, on decisions of an
‘independent’ central bank (of citizens, but not financial markets). In other,
more fragile, countries people’s hopes placed in the virtues of multipartism
are systematically destroyed. Victories delivered to these people, at the price
of wrong-headed and costly struggles, often too costly m human lives, are
precarious. A multipartism, which is manipulable and manipulated risks becoming
the only image that ‘market democracy’, gives to its people.

Under these circumstances it is not
surprising that the world system produced through neo-liberal politics should
be founded on hegemony, arrogance, military intervention and the cynical
manipulation of double standards. Neo-liberalism systematically produces social
crises and faces permanent revolt and inevitable explosions. This results in
the need for a large police force and, among other things, a world police
force; it must maintain the individualist strategy espoused by Washington and
this is why despite market conflicts which could oppose them and despite
declared reservations expressed in the area of defence of culture for example,
the triad countries remain in the wake of the United States. They are incapable
of liberating themselves from the logic of neo-liberal globalisation and it
remains for the governments of the countries in question to simply encourage
the arrogance of the United States. The bombing of Iraq, a decision taken
unilaterally by Washington, despite reservations expressed by the UN is the
most striking proof of this so far. We are sadly forced to note that never
since the presence of Hitler have we seen a government so blatantly compose so
false a report to give credence to its premeditated military aggression. Will
the UN really suffer the fate of the League of Nations? Will it be considered
to be an encumbrance and useless as has been said in the press on the other
side of the Atlantic, and expressed in terms that hold a terrible reminder of
the terms the power that be wielded against the League of Nations.

Neo-liberalism has not produced a “New
World order” strengthening the security of people and peace. On the contrary,
it has produced chaos and the increase in conflict.

3. The meaning of crisis

This globalisation of neo-liberalism has
entered the stage of dissolution. In the short space of a few years the absurd
myth of freedom of the market which was to resolve social problems and lay the
foundations for democracy has crumbled away. Social struggle in the workplace
has begun again here and there, in France, Italy, Germany, Korea. The arrogant
discourse of neo-liberalism has already got lead in its wings. At the same time,
the extension of financial globalisation, in which Russia and the south-east
Asian countries played a part in the second half of the 90s will lead to the
financial bankruptcy of these same countries within a few years, contributing
to the dissolution of one whole part of the system, that of a global market.
These “economic crises” have been accompanied by political crises, be it Russia
or ex-Yugoslavia, central Africa or the Middle East and all have appeared to be
endless and without solution in the framework of political management of the
said globalisation.

The crisis of the countries in South-east
Asia and Korea was predictable and was foreseen by political analysts form the
county in question. In the 80s, these countries, and also China, were able to take
advantage of the world crisis by playing a part in globalisation of exchange of
goods (through their relative advantage of cheap labour), and calling for
foreign investment and by signing up their development projects within a
nationally governed strategy (in the case of Korea and Korea, but not the
South-east Asian countries). In the 90s Korea and South-east Asia became
increasingly open to economic globalisation, while China and India underwent a
certain isolation in this sense. Moving foreign capital surpluses were
attracted by the high economic growth in these regions and by investing did not
contribute to increased growth but rather to inflation in real-estate value and
investment. As had been predicted, the financial bubble exploded only a few years
later.

Political reactions to this crisis are
interesting and new (in the sense that they are fundamentally different to
those created by the crisis on Mexico for example). The United States and their
supporter, Japan, tried to take advantage of the Korean crisis by dismantling
their manufacturing system (on the false pretext that it was controlled by
oligarchies!) and to subsume it to the control of.... American and Japanese
oligarchies! The powers in the region tried to resist this take-over by questioning
their role in economic globalisation (re-establishment of the control of
exchange in Malaysia), or in the case of China and India, by completely
suppressing their participation in this. It was this financial dissolution
which led the G7 to evolve a new strategy, thus opening the door to a crisis in
liberal thinking.

The Russian crisis in August 1998 was not
the product of a “transposal” of the South-east Asian crisis as has often been
claimed. It could have been foreseen and predicted, as it was the result of the
policies, which had been implemented since 1990. These policies allowed the
dominant world capital to directly and indirectly through its Russian
commercial and financial intermediaries develop a strategy of pillaging the
countries’ industry (through the massive transfer of surpluses generated by the
industry to the intermediaries and to foreign capital). The destruction of the
entire productive capacity of the country, and the prospect of being reduced to
being an exporter of petrol and mined products played into the world
geostrategic aims. Quite apart from the social upheaval this caused, it
prepared a favourable base for the potential political dissolution of the
country, following on from that of the ex-USSR. For the United States, Russia,
like China and India are “too big” (only the US has the right to be a big
country) and a threat to their world dominance.

The advance of this system towards crisis
was accelerated when Russia entered the world market in 1994-1996. But it is
interesting to note here that political reaction to this crisis (the relative
neutralisation of the Elsine powers and the choice of Premakov as Prime
Minister) possibly softened the return to the strategy of transition to
capitalism and the reestablishment of a minimum of national control over this.

The political crises in the Middle East,
ex-Yugoslavia and central Africa demonstrate that political management of
globalisation associated with the dominance of the United States is
increasingly confronted with difficulties.

In the Middle East the American-Israeli
project to create a zone which is economically and financially integrated
Washington and Tel Aviv has met with problems despite the unconditional support
of the autocratic regimes and the US Gulf protectorates (which are themselves
under the military occupation of the US). Faced with this defeat Washington
opted for resolute support for Israel’s expansionist plan, rather than openly
contravene the Oslo accord. Simultaneously the US is using the situation
created by the Gulf War in 1990 to legitimise their military control over the
biggest oil region in the world. But this means they have to maintain their
aggression against Iraq such as witness operation “Desert Fox” (called
operation Monika by the Arabs). This operation arrogantly violated all
international laws.

In ex-Yugoslavia and central Africa, the
chaos created by neo-liberal options are unceasingly encouraging ethnic
cleansing and will find no solution, even military solutions, within the
framework of global neo-liberalism.

4. Arguments for
managing the world system

The themes advanced ad nauseam by the
massive propaganda machines orchestrated by the dominant media to legitimise
this unacceptable world system have lost their credibility whether they are
talking about “democracy”, “terrorism” or “nuclear danger”.

The quality of democracy is either
confederated or refused according to the whim of the day of the powers that be
who are so devoted to neo-liberal globalisation. Thus, those of the Russian
leadership who subscribed to the injunctions of the G7 and the IMF are the
“democrats” despite their conquest of Parliament through the use of canons, the
Tsarist Constitution drawn up in 1993 and their declaration that they will
ignore the election results.

The theme of terrorism, as one knows,
gives rise to an unstoppable flow of media commentaries. But never to our
knowledge has the role of the government of the United States and its agencies
(particularly the CIA) been questioned in this respect as it continues to fund,
train, equip and give permanent and continued support to the Taliban terrorists
in Afghanistan. It is with a certain wry amusement that we note how many of the
staunchest supporters of “women’s rights” in the American establishment do not
question the US support of the Taliban even though the latter’s behaviour in
this area is well known! There are, no doubt, other interests at stake, such as
those linked to the oil fiefdoms of central Asia! A certain third world country
accused, wrongly or rightly, of having sheltered a group of terrorists suffers
severe condemnation and subjected to a blockade which starves its people. Under
this harsh light of international law which we claim to have set up to judge
the crimes of the highest leaders of state would we ever judge the US whose
victims mount up in multiples of those of all the other terrorists.

When Israeli soldiers killed a woman and
her six children on Lebanese territory, which they have occupied in violation
of all UN resolutions, this is not called terrorism. When the Lebanese citizens
take their revenge and kill Israeli soldier this is quite clearly an act of
terrorism!

These examples of the cynical use of the
double standard could be recounted without end. It would be seen that the only
criterion of condemnation or praise is the degree to which the perpetrators
refuse or submit to the injunctions of the instruments of neo-liberal
globalisation.

The fears of the people faced with the
exponential growth of the production of arms of mass destruction, both nuclear
and other are quite legitimate. But the dominant system tries to neutralise
these fears using a “non-proliferation treaty” of nuclear weapons which imposes
what some call nuclear apartheid, that is to say, giving certain countries the
right (the five of the Security Council, but also Israel) to hold such arms. As
though the main danger is not precisely from these quarters which we know will
not hesitate to use these weapons in cases where its “long-distance bombings”
(which therefore don’t put our boys in danger) are shown to be ineffective.

The rise of social struggle and the
disintegration of entire areas of financial globalisation, the loss of
credibility of the dominant discourse have already given rise to the crisis in
the neo-liberal system and its ideology. It is in the light of this crisis that
we must examine the defence plan proposed by the G7 after the crisis in
South-east Asia.

This is why the G7 and
its institutions, from one day to the next, change discourse. The term
regulation, which has been until now completely forbidden, is non resurrected
and it finds its place in the discourse of these leaders: we must “regulate the
international financial stakes!” The economist in chief at the World Bank, Mr.
Steglitz, proposed opening a debate to define a new “Washington Post
consensus”. The speculator George Soros, published a study under the eloquent
title “The crisis of Global Capitalism.” We should be clear that this is a
strategy, which is working to the same objectives: to allow the dominant capital
of transnationals to remain masters. None of the people concerned are credible.
They have all been responsible for the disaster. It affords a somewhat cynical
pleasure to watch these people trying to place the responsibility for the
failure of their system on others.

But we should not
underestimate the danger that this reaction could mean. Many well-intentioned
people are in danger of being duped. The World Bank has already been trying
over the past few years to engage NGOs in its discourse of the “struggle
against poverty”.

Faced with these plans
to pursue the plan for liberal globalisation, which does not concern the people
at all, we must independently develop our own proposals for alternatives, based
on social struggle and which only the victims of the system can lead.